So you thought this was simple.

In the early 90s, in  my "Young Entrepreneur phase," I was trying to operate four stores. After three of them fell apart, mostly due to the fact their underpinnings depended a little too much on sports cards, I realized that I simply didn't have the management skills to do more than one store. 

Personnel management was a problem: dealing with multiple employees was tough, but even that could have been managed if I'd had inventory systems in place to deal with the flow of product. I tried to do all that by hand and it simply got out of hand.

In my defense, the technology wasn't there yet, and the money wasn't there to hire people to do the job. I was the little Dutch boy running between the four stores plugging holes with my fingers. It was only a matter of time before it all came crashing down. 

Ever since, I've contented myself with one store, where I can more or less keep track. I can operate one store efficiently. Along the way, Point-of-Sale computers came along, and I even tried one for awhile, but I hated it. 

It was all manageable as long as I could keep employees long enough for them to learn the ropes (usually about a six month process). I've been very lucky on that front.  I could even coast for awhile. 

Then sales on books exploded. For the last four years I've been keeping up by working on orders from home, using pencil and paper. Again, it has been manageable, even enjoyable. 

Lately, I've started to notice that good titles, ones I call "perennial" sellers, are sometimes dropping between the cracks. What happens is, a book becomes unavailable. After a few weeks, that title drops off the radar because I don't have a system in place to keep track.

It's a fairly minor problem, but growing over time. 

Last year I was offered a good deal from Penguin Random House, who distributes roughly a third of the books I carry. I could return any book I ordered, no limits. In return, I had to give up six percentage points in my discount.

I figured it was a "no-lose" proposition, and that I could test the limits of how many books could be pre-ordered.

Well, as it turned out, the number of books I'd been doing previously was right on. I didn't gain any sales by ordering more, and returning the books seemed like a huge hassle. After six months, I gave up and asked for my discount back. They gave me four percentage points, not six (I'm still trying to recover the other two points.)

So once again, I realized that keeping it simple and keeping it within my skill level was the best idea. 

The only solution to getting more complicated is a Point-of-Sale system, but I'm only going to run the store for a couple more years and I can see that half of that time would be used flailing around trying to learn to run it efficiently.

Right now, I figure that my pencil and paper system is keeping pretty good track, and it also seems to have deeper, intuitive features that I think a strictly statistical measure would lose. My brain, in other words. I can look at a title and see that it's sold only once in the last year but think, "This is a cool title to have around. I'll go ahead and reorder it."

The whole point of a POS system is telling you numerically what is selling and what isn't. If I have to go over the list and make personal intuitive decisions anyway, what good is it? 

I can say that in my store, every book has been picked personally, not by an algorithm.

If I just keep going as I'd been going before the PRH experiment, we'll be more than profitable and functional. 

However, I've learned over the years that we can't just stand pat. We can't just coast. Things start to decline fairly rapidly if we're not constantly striving to improve. In some ways, trying the improve at least keeps us even with the entropy.

This year I've decided to make the leap of ordering from two new publishers: Simon and Shuster, who carry the Viz manga books that I sell a ton of, and Scholastic, who has a lot of YA books and graphic novels I sell. If I order direct from them, I gain at least ten percentage points, even more if I order in volume. 

But it means ordering from four book distributors per week instead of two. I need to keep track of when I reach the minimum ordering levels to maximize the profit margins; measuring how long I can wait between orders before the margins are erased by not having the material to sell. 

Again, if I had a POS system, it would be easier.

I think. 

But I quail at the thought. 

I'm going to experiment with ordering from from four instead of two distributors for my books over the next six months or so. If it increases either sales or profits without completely turning into a grind, I'll keep going.

If not, I'll just go back to the previous system, which was working fine. Like I said, "working fine" is a recipe for stagnation, but better than going backward or burning myself out.